If people are really interested in saving or strengthening a genuinely international order, they are going to have to think much more seriously about how to restore respect for the very idea of such an order among the US public. Because it seems to me that much of the discussion so far of Matt’s book shows little appreciation of just how much internationalist ideals have eroded in contemporary America. People occasionally pay lip service to limited internationalist ideals; and they may sincerely assent to vague platitudes about the importance of cooperating with others, and not going it alone. But it doesn’t appear to me that there is any deep public commitment to internationalism, or even much understanding of it. Except for people who have studied at schools of international law and diplomacy, I doubt that 5 Americans in 100 could give any coherent account of the basic structure of the international system, or the foundation of US commitments to that system.

Schoolchildren in the US go through various stages of learning about government at different levels. But so far as I know, very, very few study the UN charter. They learn nothing about the organizational structure of the UN. They are not taught what US obligations are under international law. They certainly are not taught that they should have respect for these obligations. They are not taught about the way treaties are concluded and ratified, or the constitutional support for international legal commitments.

A few years ago I taught at a college here in New Hampshire. A proposal came forth from some faculty members that we should fly the UN flag on campus. The US flag would still be given pride of place, of course, but with the UN flag flown below it, or off to the side on another staff. This proposal was deemed far too controversial by the administration, and went nowhere. We might as well have proposed to fly the Cuban or North Korean flag. It seems that for a large number of Americans these days, the United Nations is an enemy at worst, a nuisance in the middle, or a joke at best.

Of course, there were always a lot of people who didn’t like the UN. But they weren’t in the ascendancy, and the lines were more clearly drawn. Liberals, in the broad sense, were internationalists and loved the UN. Conservatives were sovereigntists, and disliked the UN. Conservatives decried elitist, socialist internationalists and worried about UN plots to take over the world. Liberals mocked these xenophobic and provincial conservatives and their paranoid fears about black UN helicopters and hidden UN tanks preparing for the takeover. It was clear and simple. One knew where one stood.

Then something happened to the liberals. There has been a steady erosion of liberal support for the UN since … oh, I would say about 1967.

Younger people might be amused to explore some of the portrayals of the United Nations in popular culture in an earlier era. The United Nations building was once portrayed as an imposing and serious place where important things actually happened, even a place for dangerous intrigues. See Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for example. The modernist building was an architectural symbol of the modern world, and the power structure of that world. But nobody today thinks of the UN as the place where powerful people actually run the world. No serious director would make a political or espionage thriller about international men of mystery where the UN was a big deal. Can you imagine Jason Bourne having a climactic shootout inside the UN? Please. He might as well shoot it out at White Castle.

Conservatives don’t even bother much about the UN anymore. When a conservative pundit wants to fret and rant about socialist internationalists, he goes after George Soros, not the UN. A single individual now represents for them everything that is left of the liberal internationalist agenda they once feared and despised.

Now we still have plenty of liberal internationalists, but many have a very different orientation from liberals of the past. Whereas the founders of the United Nations were very much concerned with creating an order that strongly deterred the intervention of some states in the affairs of others, the message I hear from a lot of liberal internationalists these days is that it is too hard to intervene abroad. They chafe under the restrictions imposed by international law and the UN charter. They are more polite about it than the conservatives, but they signal in all sorts of way that they have pretty much had it with the UN. Hence the Concert of Democracies, the responsibility to protect and similar proposals. When is the last time you heard a liberal internationalist claim that the chief goal of global policy should be to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war? John Ikenberry, whose article Matt cited, apparently thinks we have basically solved the problem of war among great powers, so it’s no big deal anymore.

In 2008, for Americans, the UN lacks the dignity and majesty to function as an institution capable of exerting any sort of governing force over the United States and its people. Since the UN lacks the power to enforce its will through arms, whatever power it has comes from the respect and deference people show for it. It needs some sort of intimidating presence, even if that presence comes from nothing but a vague aura of respectability and gravity. But it is hard to imagine a circumstance in which the UN and the United States have a significant difference over security policy, and in which the people of the United States back down because the UN says they should. That's because, for Americans, the UN has no aura left of any kind.